Since our founding at the Stanford d.school, Wayfinder has been committed to helping schools become sites of meaningful learning and development. Just as states and districts have put great care and attention into developing relevant and impactful Portrait of Graduate frameworks, Wayfinder has rigorously built our content around the skills and dispositions students will need to maintain well-being, succeed in school, and navigate the future with confidence. Our content is grounded in decades of educational, neurological, and psychological research and developed using human-centered design to create learning experiences that reflect the needs of today’s students and educators.
Our Core Skills include inter- and intrapersonal competencies and proactive habits of mind. We teach all our Core Skills by connecting and grounding them in students’ real-world experiences to help them better move through the world with purpose.
Research on education and the future workforce suggests a four-pronged approach for designing curriculum that enhance students’ human-centered skills and career readiness:
This research echoes the approach we use to ideate, plan, and create all of our curriculum. Built around uplifting students’ strengths and bolstered by Universal Design for Learning to promote trauma-informed practices, our Foundations, Belonging, and Purpose curriculum empowers PreK-12 students to embrace their potential and grow toward self-actualization as they develop the skills and competencies that will support them to flourish.
Self-awareness puts people in tune with their needs, makes them more aware of their impact on others, and prepares them to deal with disruption and change. It is also recognized as an essential component of effective management and is even used by business schools as a framework for helping students develop managerial skills. Given that it is one of several important employable skills that benefit all workers, and that managerial positions are expected to remain an important part of the future workforce, it makes sense for students to begin building a foundation of reflective thinking and self-assessment as they progress through their education.
Adaptability is key to navigating uncertainty. It helps support students’ mental health and professional readiness. Future professionals who can maintain self-efficacy when faced with new demands and challenges will be those most poised to succeed. The importance of adaptability will only increase as the workforce continues to change and develop.
Empathy supports healthy relationship building, which in turn helps create supportive working environments conducive to productivity. In an increasingly globalized workforce, empathy is also important for navigating professional interactions across differences in cultural and organizational practices. It is important for the success of multigenerational workforces and has been shown to improve outcomes in fields like engineering. Empathy is also an important component to ensure businesses grow more environmentally conscious.
Collaboration in the workforce has been shown to support innovation, creativity, and prudent decision making. Whether co-located or working remotely, collaboration improves organizational performance and results in higher-quality products and services.
Agency is believed to be the driving force behind self-motivation and satisfaction—important for both student engagement and employee success. Conversely, a lack of agency in the workplace contributes to anxiety, which reduces productivity and performance. When young people acknowledge and harness their individual agency, they develop skills that empower them in their learning and make them effective in their future professional lives.
Purpose is important both for entering the workforce with intention and growing successfully as a professional. Seventy percent of people report defining their purpose through work, and it is expected that purpose-driven work will continue to become more common over time. People with purpose are able to align their skills and values with their work, making them more engaged and motivated employees. Purposeful organization leaders are better able to navigate market disruption, and employees are more resilient when faced with work-related stressors. Guiding young people to develop purpose can help them find work and career paths that bring them personal satisfaction and help them continue to succeed in their fields.
Each of these future-ready skills supports students in their classroom learning and their paths toward becoming well-prepared for their lives after graduation. Foundational human competencies help students build comprehensive awareness of themselves, their values, and the world around them, while purpose puts awareness into action. It gives students a way to apply their personal development to a tangible exploration of ways they can make a difference in their communities and the world at large.
Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence and Wayfinder advisory board member Dr. Bill Damon emphasizes that purposeful learning is imperative in modern education:
Wayfinder’s PreK-12 curriculum is intentionally designed to cultivate purpose as a driving force for students' personal growth and long-term success. By integrating appropriate purpose development across all grade levels, Wayfinder ensures that students build fundamental, future-ready competencies in ways that are meaningful and actionable. Our curriculum guides students to connect their strengths, values, and interests to real-world opportunities—empowering them to navigate life’s complexities with confidence.
As students develop a sense of purpose, they become more engaged learners, more resilient in the face of challenges, and better prepared to contribute meaningfully to their communities and future careers. Embedding purpose into every stage of education, Wayfinder helps young people discover direction, motivation, and fulfillment—ensuring they not only succeed in school but thrive in life.
Leading educational researcher and author of Teaching for Purpose Dr. Heather Malin found that students who completed Wayfinder’s Purpose curriculum made significant improvements in all key measured areas.
Dr. Heather Malin’s research findings indicate that students who engaged with Wayfinder’s high school Purpose curriculum grew nearly 75% in measures of purpose—11 times greater than the control group. Comparisons of pre- and post-program surveys also show that 55% of students grew in engagement, and 64% grew in social awareness, over double the growth seen from students in the control group.
Dr. Malin commented on these findings: “It’s unusual and highly encouraging to see such unambiguously positive growth in measures of students’ purposefulness. As this study shows, it is clear that implementing comprehensive learning supports students to thrive in school and build skills to help them navigate the complexities of life.”
To learn more about Wayfinder’s Core Skills and the impact they can make in developing and implementing a Portrait of a Graduate framework, download our white paper, Portrait of a Future-Ready Graduate: Why Human Skills Matter More Than Ever.